u/HiroProtagonest

I should've attacked Poland and Lithuania before they joined the coalition, but I didn't realize the Lithuania's truce was about to wear off until a time where my armies were low maintenance and it was just a couple months away. Meanwhile Poland had been out of truce for a while and hadn't yet joined the coalition. Scandinavia and Britain would have also protected them, and while I could take them, I didn't wanna start it on the backfoot. Guess I shoulda just pulled the trigger asap. After losing a really close battle to France that I thought I had, I don't see a way out. Spain was my ally and chickened out, but Milan's an OPM and decided to fight for my honor.

At least I got the Dithmarschen-specific achievement after Scandinavia wiped out Denmark. It was an interesting campaign, none of the usual PUs in Europe happened, Austria lost emperorship of the HRE to smaller duchies, Ottomans easily conquered Hungary and were blobbing out but then just kinda stopped and got hit hard by decadence mid-1600s. Shun actually took the mandate of heaven for once and remained kinda strong despite fumbling their authority.

This is basically my first time playing in europe and I was too gunshy on pushing into it - there's such an obvious period in the timelapse during the 1600s where I barely take any land at all. One problem I had was when I had too many diplo relations I broke my alliance with the pope, which then had the papacy rival me, so then Austria also broke their alliance with me, if I'd just taken the extra relation on the chin for a while or found some other way to deal with it, I would have kept a very powerful ally to help me build my early-mid powerbase. The War of the Leagues also didn't weaken europe as much as I'd hoped as Austria-Hungary was far too strong to have much of a challenge with the protestant league. I finally went aggro in the late-game and it taught me how far I can push - and also that it's relatively easy to fight Spain, at least when I don't have to fight them and Portugal at the same time. I only fought Portugal once and it was harder and way more annoying, especially since they had PUed England real early on. Anyway, definitely made some mistakes with expanding like I should have only grabbed a single Hungarian province (in addition to non-Hungary provinces) after my first war with Austria and used that to release Hungary as a pronoia since they have so many cores, same for Poland once I could claim one of those. That would've helped managed my AE a lot. But I was just too scared of AE as well. It was annoying that the Mamluks kept building my AE whenever I took land in europe as well, when a coalition did form the Mamluks joined it and I couldn't take one last war against them. But ultimately, I always found a target that avoided the coalition. I also saw how useful trucebreaking could be, as nations in a truce can't join the coalition.

After comfortably establishing myself in a survivable position I allied with Russia and Timurids, and then Ethiopia, so I could easily move into asia and africa. I conquered all the persian lands needed for the Byzantium MT before Delhi became Defender of the Sunni Faith and would have made wars in the region annoying (I fought exactly one war Delhi was involved in). And Byzantium is such a good tag aside from the lack of military bonuses. The MT being about both expanding and devving makes it tall and wide, pronoias are strong, 25% CCR, the Theme System reform giving local manpower modifiers. It was also an opportunity to try out parliament. And ultimately, I was happy to just chill for a bit in the timeline after the early-game was such a frantic pace of proactive survival measures, so I don't mind that I super slowed down the moment I wouldn't just game over for doing so. Also shoutout to Ming for going from the brink of extinction to a great power, just like me fr fr.